Laurence Housman's income as author and illustrator

In true romantic and post-romantic fashion, Housman claims in his autobiography, The Unexpected Years, that remaining true to his art meant that he achieved a good reputation but so small an income that he always had to share lodgings with his sister and was never able to consider marriage and a family. — Photograph by George P. Landow.

My doubts of my ability to make a living, either by
illustration or writing, had had plenty of confirmation
during the first ten years of my life in London. My first
scanty earnings had been for the job which John Sparkes
got me the revision of Vere Foster's and Poynter's
drawing-books; and after that, the designing of small
devices for commercial firms connected with the printing
trade. Between the year 1887, when I finished my
training at South Kensington, and 1893, I earned
277l. 153p. 6d., an average of less than £50 a year. During
the two decades following (from my twenty-eighth to my
forty-seventh year) I made incomes of the following
amounts: 146l 135p. 6d.; 156l. 93s. 0d.; 130l 73p. 6l.; 223l 93s. 9d. These are fairly, but not quite consecutive. In
other years I did better; in the year of An Englishwoman's
Love-letters I made 2,072l 145p. 1d.; but even with that
mighty windfall for the worst book I ever wrote, my
average for those twenty years was only £365. Yet for
the last fifteen of those years I was fairly well known both
as author and illustrator, with one book to my discredit
which had almost ranked as a best-seller, and partauthorship
of a play Prunella which has been a continual
source of income ever since. In the second year of the
War I made Prunella l85 ps. 10d.; in the third, 165l 2s. 2d.
Since the War I have had an income amply sufficient for a
bachelor, sharing house with a relation who is also selfsupporting.

It is not usual, I suppose, for an author to give so
detailed a return of his income for the information of the
general public; but I do so for two reasons first because
my indifference to a paying popularity has, I believe, in
the long run helped and not hindered my output of the
things which seemed to me most worth doing; and secondly
because my small income has not prevented me from
living a happy life. It is true that such an income made
it impossible for me to marry, had I wished it, in the
class to which I was supposed to belong; I could not,
until I was well over forty, have run the risk of a family.
But as the not impossible 'She' never came within the
horizon of my waking dreams, that deprivation was more
theoretical than real. Nevertheless there remains a large
disproportion between the respectable reputation which
I began to acquire in my early thirties, and the monetary
return I got from it. And I wonder whether other
authors my superiors in quality, and my equals in the
favour of the critics have had similar experiences:
whether an author who does not aim at popularity must
always have a hard time, unless his needs are as modest,
and as unmatrimonial as were mine.